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Gregory Maguire Casts a Spell
By Kay Ikuta,
Inglewood
Public Library
On July 11, ALA Conference
Services’ Auditorium Speakers Series presented bestselling fantasy author
Gregory Maguire. Maguire is best known as the author of Wicked, a classic that
became the Tony Award winning Broadway musical of the same name.
Maguire,
who has written adult novels as well as children’s books, serves on the board
of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, a nonprofit organization
that advocates for literacy, literature, and libraries. He demonstrated that an
author’s life is not spent in absolute solitude as he recounted his run-ins
with fellow author David Sedaris during book tours. They first met at a Harvard
bookstore, where he had to buy a book and stand in line with others.
Maguire’s stated theme is to work with “stolen property.” After a brief stint in an orphanage (his mother died during childbirth), he joined his father, a journalist and his new mother, a poet and all his new siblings. Together they used imagination to create stories, e.g. they recreated the characters from The Wizard of Oz. He stated that as we grow and diversify we develop different responses to faith…and nuances of atmosphere, but we don’t lose the common things we shared as children, i.e. the “common language of children.”
He
is currently working on a new book called Making Mischief: a Maurice Sendak Appreciation.
Another book, Matchless is due out in November 2009. This work stemmed from an
assignment for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”
to write an original story with a Christmas theme. They asked Mr. Maguire to give
it the “Maguire treatment.” He took Hans Christian Andersen’s classic
the Little Match Girl and gave her life again.
His appearance was sponsored by HarperCollins Publishers.
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Connections
» from page 13
real books.”
Sitomer
read a story, written by one of his students, Brijonea, which described her experience
as a victim of a random shooting.
“So why does a student like [her] still come to school?” he asked. “Brijonea comes to school because of people like us.”
Sitomer urged the audience to “fight the good fight” to keep school libraries, like his own, from closing. He reiterated that “real books are the primary tools to build the real connections to the 21st century.” He listed the new 3Rs he finds to be most meaningful: relevance, relationships, and rigor, all of which he believes can only be built through engaging young people with books. The final speaker, Jacqueline Woodson, award-winning author of Locomotion, Feathers, and Hush, began by emphasizing the educational importance of making connections with young people. “Each time there is that one-on-one connection, it makes a difference; it changes everything,” she said. Woodson described reading books as a child at the public library in Brooklyn and admitted, laughingly, that the first hardcover book she owned was stolen from the public library. It was a book of African American poetry which so profoundly affected her that years later a poem she read from the collection formed the basis of one of her novels. “Literature,” said Woodson, “has a way of resonating with young people. We can’t see those future moments always, but it stays with us.”
Woodson ended with words of encouragement for school librarians facing budget challenges: “I’m so grateful for the work you’re doing. There is no need to get overwhelmed. We are creating change. Even in this moment we are creating change.”
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